Tag: TSMC

Ten years, even five years ago Intel was the undisputed process leader, and if you wanted to see how the new process node would look like, you would wait to see a new processor coming from Intel architecture. That was the unwritten law of the semiconductor industry, with an occasional blimp when TSMC would introduce a half-node step, beating Intel’s 90/65/45/32nm with 80nm, 55nm, 40nm and 28nm GPUs for ATI and Nvidia. Today, Intel’s missed approach to mobile resulted in company loosing the process node advantage, and ultimately being forced to cancel the most of Atom product family. And now, to add insult to injury, DigiTimes (also known

Nvidia Pascal Editor’s Day is taking shape as select group of press, analysts and gaming VIPs are flying to Austin, the capitol of Texas, and then being driven to a W Hotel where the festivities will take place. We already know that Electronic Arts will reveal next installation of Battlefield franchise at 1PM Pacific, 10PM Central European Time while we can now deliver the news that the public part of Pascal Editor’s Day will take place at 6PM Pacific, Midnight Zulu i.e. GMT, and 2AM in Europe. Conveniently for Asian markets, the stream will take place in the morning hours on Saturday, i.e. weekend. Previous launches almost

Back on CES 2016, Jen-Hsun Huang unveiled the Nvidia DRIVE PX 2, a mobile supercomputer which now serves as a base for development of self-driving vehicles from the likes of Volvo, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, General Motors and many others. DRIVE PX 2 comes with an impressive set of specifications, which are delivering no less than 24 TOPS and 8 TFLOPS SP performance. The first DRIVE PX 2 system delivered to the customers actually used Maxwell-based MXM modules, i.e. it used a combination of first generation Pascal-based Tegra silicon with a known value, the GM206 graphics processor. Fast forward to three months later, Jen-Hsun was back on the stage

On February 10, 2016 Southern Taiwan was struck with a 6.4 magnitude earthquake, which so far killed 116 people. Numerous factories were impacted by the quake, and we’re starting to receive reports that damage to the factories is worse than previously estimated. TSMC initially reported that “95% of its machines could be restored in 2-3 days,” with Fab 6 and 14B being fully restored as of today (February 15). TSMC, world’s second largest semiconductor manufactured is now stating that the damage due to the quake impacted larger number of in-production wafers than the company previously estimated. The company now expects that its overall output will be reduced

AMD received a substantial coverage at VentureBeat recently, with Dean Takahashi interviewing key executives in succession. First off was an in-depth interview with Lisa Su (CEO and Chairman of AMD), followed by an interview with Raja Koduri, Head (CEO?) of Radeon Technologies Group. RTG is AMD’s spin-off which you can compare with the spin-off of manufacturing division you now know as GlobalFoundries, just without a strong sovereign wealth fund (like Mubadala Development Company)… for now. In order to execute on a huge market opportunity in the form of Virtual Reality, RTG wants to make sure all the basics are covered. For starters, one of more painful episodes from the company

At the Japanese edition of NVIDIA GTC (GPU Technology Conference), NVIDIA finally revealed details behind its 2016 graphics architecture, codenamed Pascal. The architecture was launched at the main GTC event, which took place in San Jose on March 17th, 2015 (watch Jen-Hsun Huang’s GTC keynote here). GTC Japan was hosted by Marc Hamilton. As always, the Pascal GPU will be manufactured in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), using the brand new 16nm FinFET process. This process is much more than a simple number, since it marks the shift from planar, 2D transistors to the FinFET i.e. 3D transistors. This shift required that the engineers make lot of changes in the

On Thursday (LON: ARM) and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TPE: 2330) announced a plan to deliver ARM-based processors on TSMC 10FinFET process node. The two companies said that their roadmap would place the release of the 10nm chips in the fourth quarter of 2015. In the announcing press release, the companies said that the success of the transition from 20nm to 16FinFET influenced their decision to work together again on the deal. As announced at Computex in June, ARM is building a research and innovation center in Hsinchu, Taiwan home to the headquarters of TSMC and MediaTek. “ARM and TSMC are industry leaders in our

The old Federal Reserve Building at 301 Battery Street in San Francisco was the venue selected by Samsung to introduce their R&D foray into Silicon Valley on Wednesday evening. The usual “We are Samsung, we are the world” presentation proved that Samsung has turned into the 800 Pound Gorilla of the semiconductor industry. The company is investing a good deal of money in the San Jose R&D complex on Tasman Drive, San Jose which they’ll be moving into next summer upon its completion. The inclusion of this information in each of the presenters foil set indicates the center looms large in the companies thought processes.

Intel today announced that they would be partnering with Rockchip to launch a series of Android-focused mobile SoCs based on Intel’s SoFIA architecture which combines Intel’s x86 architecture with their own modem technology into a single SoC. This would include Intel providing Rockchip with quadcore SoCs running Intel’s own x86 architecture and modems. The SoFIA is essentially a culmination of all of Intel’s work in the mobile space but lacks Intel’s own GPU IP because it utilizes Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR graphics architecture instead. Intel has traditionally used PowerVR graphics in their mobile chips for many years but as their desktop and laptop GPUs got better